list.co.uk/music EXPERIMENTAL WREKMEISTER HARMONIES Light Falls (Thrill Jockey) ●●●●●
ELECTRONIC POP BANKS The Altar (Virgin EMI) ●●●●●
Records | MUSIC
‘I wanted to sonically convey the idea of slow, creeping change,’ explains JR Robinson, who forms the core of Wrekmeister Harmonies with Esther Shaw. ‘When I came up with the title I was thinking of how, when daylight turns to night-time, it’s a very gradual process. You are lulled into watching this slow, peaceful sunset but then all of a sudden you look up and it’s dark.’ BANKS is an edgy person. She only ever wears black. She never uses her first name. She raps. There’s a danger though, with the current vogue for cool, electronic pop, that all those beats and synths leave the listener a bit bored. That’s certainly the fate that befell BANKS’ debut album Goddess, lost amid 2014’s flood of nonchalant female-fronted electronic pop.
Light Falls effectively captures his vision with stunning results. The opening Her second LP sees considerable improvement, navigating empowerment and
triptych starts with ‘Light Falls I – The Mantra’ and gentle looping acoustic guitar, organ and keys subtly build underneath as croaking vocals repeat ‘Stay in / Go out / Get sick / Get well / Light Falls’. ‘Light II – The Light Burns Us All’ drops in a grisly heavyweight guitar dirge before seguing into the gentler ‘Light III – Light Sick’ which repeats the trick. There’s a hypnotic energy in the repetition. A continual progression from light to dark, dragging you deeper and deeper into a sea of shadows. The fragile strings of ‘The Gathering’ contrast with crashing distortion, while the harrowing ‘Some Were Saved, Some Drowned’ is powered by screaming desperation. However, it’s the haunting ‘Where Have You Been My Lovely Son?’ that carries the most emotional weight, inspired by Robinson's fractured relationship with his own son.
There are elements of Pink Floyd, Nine Inch Nails, Mogwai and Nick Cave
thrown into the mix, but Robinson and Shaw still manage to walk their
anxiety while providing shiny, slick pop moments throughout. Promising new single ‘Fuck With Myself’ has BANKS’ voice swooning to and fro in a bold, taut take on self-doubt, while ‘Gemini Feed’ works up from a sombre piano opening to a remix- tempting refrain. Similarly on ‘Trainwreck’ and ‘Mind Games’, disquieting songs about paranoia,
regret and jealousy are disguised by chart-worthy arrangements while lyrics that would otherwise sound overwrought (‘We were so depressive’) are used as ammunition for synth-saturated bridges and chorus lines, keeping a potentially challenging album accessible.
Despite her foray into the territory of the authentic, confessional chanteuse, BANKS makes some pretty heavy missteps. On ‘Judas’, her obsession with 90s R&B tips over into sounding like something that could have genuinely been released by Mis-Teeq, while on ‘Weaker Girl’, she tells us she’s a ‘bad motherfucker’ which is absurd because her first name is Jillian.
own distinct path. Less brutal than previous Wrekmeister Harmonies releases, the new lineup features Thierry Amar, Sophie Trudeau and Timothy Herzog of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and you can feel their influence in the song structures; starting quietly then building to monstrous, crashing crescendos. Moments of downbeat delicate grace highlighted by vicious chaos, the apocalypse has never sounded so beautiful. (Henry Northmore) ■ Out Fri 16 Sep.
The Altar is about four tracks too long, and minimalistic strings number ‘Mother Earth’ is not enough to relieve the sense of ennui that descends when you’ve been listening to over an hour of oppressive trap beats. BANKS uses every weapon in the arsenal of the electro-pop siren – from mesmerising choruses, sultry, pulsing electronic beats and tales about relationships too complicated for Facebook – when what she really needs is to cut her material down. (Sam Bradley) ■ Out Fri 30 Sep.
FOLK KING CREOSOTE Astronaut Meets Appleman (Domino) ●●●●● ROCK TEENAGE FANCLUB Here (PeMa) ●●●●●
He’s never been an artist who’s given the impression of playing the game or of grasping for fame, but there’s been something of an air of returning to the big(gish) time for Kenny Anderson recently. A cult hero as King Creosote since the late 1990s, he finally hit the wider public consciousness with 2011’s Mercury Prize- nominated Diamond Mine, a perfect distillation of his delicate, wistful, perfectly Fife muse, produced in collaboration with Jon Hopkins.
The immediate aftermath of this burst of success, however, saw him seem to recoil from the strictures of mainstream fame; efforts to record a Diamond Mine follow-up were resisted, and his next success was of the slow-burn sort, with 2014’s soundtrack to the film From Scotland With Love taking longer to let its sometimes astonishing quality sink into the bones of listeners. Amid the usual plethora of recordings on his own label Fence, then, this return once more to Domino feels like some kind of conscious comeback, a follow-up of sorts to the last half-decade’s two sizeable critical successes. Once more, it’s a great album, yet there’s a greater sense of wistful reserve to
Astronaut Meets Appleman than either Diamond Mine or From Scotland With Love bore. Anderson has become a father again and the confusing blend of optimism, fatigue, romance and resignation which accompanies that state is evident here. Opener ‘You Just Want’ moves to a glacial rhythm, a breathy female vocal part
The notion of contentment gets a lacklustre rap in rock’n’roll. But easing into life’s quiet pleasures, and revelling in what we’ve got, are the philosophies at the heart of Teenage Fanclub’s tenth long-player – and it could not be more inspiring or beautiful.
The album’s in-the-moment title and pacifying cover art (mountains, forests,
waterfalls) set the scene for this heartening record. Opening track, ‘I’m In Love’, is a chiming power-pop serenade whose chorus – ‘It feels good, when you’re next to me, that’s enough’ – recalls 1997’s glorious ‘Ain’t That Enough’. Harmonic folk-rock shimmy ‘Live In the Moment’ urges us to ‘embrace the here and now’, while ‘Hold On’ is a classic pop call-to-arms (‘I don’t hear much fanfare for the common man these days’ . . . ‘Simple pleasures are all we need’). Over 25 years into TFC’s career, there is – perhaps unsurprisingly – more of a sense of looking back these days. It’s in the past tense yearning of shimmering psych-rock psalm ‘I Was Beautiful When I Was Alive’; it’s in the sun-kissed punk of ‘Thin Air’ (‘I was hiding, I was always in disguise’); and it’s all over the longing (yet celebratory) brass fanfares on kaleidoscopic soul-rock trip ‘The First Sight’ (‘To simpler ways I’ll return’. . . ‘Things will pass, it’s just the way it’s always been planned’).
and eventually a gorgeous harp in the background; on ‘Melin Wynt’ Anderson The album’s songwriting was split equally between Norman Blake, Raymond
dreamily realises ‘with my track record jaws will hit the floor / but all that has to change’; ‘Love Life’ is perhaps cheeriest of all, but still resigned, in this case to not getting any: ‘all my chemicals cry out with desire,’ he sings, ‘Scarlett Johansson was never in my house.’ He dreams of escape to where ‘life is a whole lot safer underground’ on the buzzing, imploring ‘Surface’, but once again his urge to come up for air and put it all out there is heaven for the listener. (David Pollock) ■ Out Fri 2 Sep.
McGinley and Gerry Love – each wrote separately, with no prior discussion of over-arching themes – but what emerges is an enlightening, intuitive body of work whose ideas echo and reinforce each other as they venture into unexplored corners, casting welcome light on the darkness of the night, and life. The album’s all-but-final words may be ‘disappear into shadows’, but that only serves as a timely reminder to never lose sight of TFC’s bright wonder. (Nicola Meighan) ■ Out Fri 9 Sep. 1 Sep–3 Nov 2016 THE LIST 71